Longevity
 

 

 

 

 

The cemetery in Vourliotes is very small.  I think I counted only about 50 marked graves in it last year.  The custom here is to bury the dead under a small marble crypt.  After 5 years the body is exhumed by the family, the bones are carefully washed and transferred to a small box then stored in an ossuary for as long as there are family members around to care for them.

 

I started looking at the dates on those crypts and noticed that there were 3 women in the cemetery whose average age  was 100.  If half the people in the cemetery were women, then 3 in 25 of the women in the cemetery, or 12% of the women buried in that cemetery in the past five years, lived to be 100.  My math skills aren't the best, but that is an astonishing number.



Touching Down on Samos June 1, 2017
 




Kathy surprised Giannis with a few of these patches

  she'd made for him on her new sewing machine, just

 a day or two before leaving the States for Samos.

Landing on Samos this year was sweet indeed after more than 24 hours of travel time since leaving Mayport.  Giannis was waiting at the airport for us with a rental car, and all was right with the world again.

  

I've become more eager to get back to Samos every year, but have also come to dread the process of getting there.  This year we flew Delta.  They had oversold several seats on the flight from Jacksonville to Kennedy flight, and had oversold the flight from Kennedy to Athens by 6 seats.  Travelers can forget their manners in boarding lines, even with sequenced boarding sections, but waiting in the boarding line for Athens, felt like waiting to board the last American helicopter to leave Saigon.

One year we got back to find that the water had been shut off.  This year the electricity was off, but the thick stone walls had insulated the house which felt like an air conditioner had been on while we'd been gone.  A couple of cold showers, a change into a clean set of clothes, and we walked up to the Blue Chairs Restaurant for a Greek salad and a couple bottles of cold beer.